A Short History of Spain

by Mary Platt Parmele

It lasted for years, the poor young King and Queen being driven from one city to another, while the Austrian Archduke was at Madrid striving to reign over a people who would not recognize him.

Spain was being made the sport of three nations in pursuance of their own ambitious ends. Her land was being ravaged by foreign armies, recruited from three of her own disaffected provinces; while a young King with whom she was well satisfied was peremptorily ordered to make way for one Austria, England, and Holland preferred. It was a humiliating proof of the decline in national spirit, and the old Castilian pride must have sorely degenerated for such things to be possible.

Finally, after Louis XIV. had once more given solemn oath that the crowns of France and Spain should never be united, the "Peace of Utrecht" was signed (1713). But the provisions of the treaty were momentous for Spain. She was at one stroke of the pen stripped of half her possessions in Europe. Philip V. was acknowledged King of Spain and the Indies. But Sicily, with its regal title, was ceded to the Duke of Savoy; Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and the Netherlands went to Karl, now Emperor Charles VI. of Germany; while Minorca and Gibraltar passed to the keeping of England.

No one felt unmixed satisfaction, except perhaps England. The Archduke had failed to get his throne, and to wear the double crown like Charles V. Louis had carried his point. He had succeeded in keeping the kingdom for his grandson. But that kingdom was dismembered, and had shrunk to insignificant proportions in Europe, while England, most fortunate of all, had carried off the key to the Mediterranean. That little rocky promontory of Gibraltar was potentially of more value than all the rest!

Such was the beginning of the dynasty of the Bourbon in Spain. Philip was succeeded, upon his death in 1746, by his son Ferdinand VI., who also died, in 1759, and was succeeded by his brother, Philip's second son, who was known as Carlos III. When we try to praise these princes of the wretched Bourbon line, it is by mention of the evil they have refrained from doing rather than the good they have done. So Carlos III. is said to have done less harm to Spain than his predecessors. He established libraries and academies of science and of arts, and ruled like a kind-hearted gentleman, without the vices of his recent predecessors. His severity toward the Jesuits and their forcible expulsion from Spain, in 1767, are said to have been caused by personal resentment on account of some slanderous rumors regarding his birth, which were traced to them.

CHAPTER XXI.

But the fate of Spain was not now in the hands of her Kings. Were they good or evil she was destined henceforth to drift in the currents of circumstance, that sternest of masters, to whom her Kings as well as her people would be obliged helplessly to bow. All that she now possessed outside the borders of her own kingdom was the West Indies, her colonies in America, North and South, and the Philippines, that archipelago of a thousand isles in the southern Pacific, where Magellan was slain by the savage inhabitants after he had discovered it (1520).

Mexico and Peru had proved to be inexhaustible sources of wealth, and when the gold and silver diminished, the Viceroys in these and the other colonies could compel the people to wring rich products out of the soil, enough to supply Spain's necessities. The inhabitants of these colonies, composed of the aboriginal races with an admixture of Spanish, had been treated as slaves and drudges for so many centuries that they never dreamed of resistance, nor questioned the justice of a fate which condemned them always to toil for Spain.

In the North the feeble colony planted in 1620 had expanded into thirteen vigorous English colonies. France, too, had been colonizing in America, and had drawn her frontier line from the mouth of the Mississippi to Canada. In 1755 a collision occurred between England and France over their American boundaries. By the year 1759, France had lost Quebec and every one of her strongholds, and she formed an alliance with Spain in a last effort to save her vanishing possessions in America.